I've been reading @JeffGoodell@twitter.com's book The Water Will Come and Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 at the same time, and it's a trip. It's almost like they collaborated on the two books. (Also: lots of co-ops in NY 2140)
The deep entanglement of sea level rise & land value appreciation as a primary means of economic "growth" is going to get messy, and fast.
More at-risk, low-lying locations will lose value, or appreciate more slowly. The affordability will attract or concentrate lower income, vulnerable populations with the least financial capacity to deal with the coming loss.
Subsidized government flood insurance is wildly underpriced. Pricing it appropriately would capitalize future losses into present day property values, popping the bubble. It’s political suicide to make the predictable future losses visible in the present.
Meanwhile, property tax revenues — a major source of funding to help with mitigation of & adaptation to sea level rise — will get wiped out by declining property values.
Banks are starting to notice that flood insurance doesn’t cover the whole value of the properties they’re using as collateral. When they stop offering 30yr fixed mortgages on under-insured properties, property values will crater.
But if they *require* appropriate levels of insurance from the private market (above the subsidized cap) then those premiums get capitalized into the property value, driving it down, *also* eroding the value of the collateral.
The value just isn’t there.
And if the public were going to buy out threatened properties to reduce overall risks, and the need to expend public money protecting those properties… what’s the right price? In the long run, those property values are going to zero.
And that’s how we end up with the gray-market real estate of the Intertidal. Nobody owns it, and it’s technically worthless, but the crumbling infrastructure has residual value to folks with few other options. Like the little old ladies living in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.
Complicating all of this, thanks to an overly entitled wealthy coastal enclave in Florida, a judicial precedent has now been set that makes governments liable for *not* maintaining vulnerable infrastructure which should never have been built, or which ought to be abandoned based on what we know now. (PDF) http://www.floridasupremecourt.org/clerk/briefs/2011/1201-1400/11-1294_JurisAns.pdf
@ZaneSelvans
NY 2140 really got me thinking more about the intersections of finance and ecology. Got any recommendations on where to start learning more of the $$$ side of things?
And then on top of all that, there’s the fact that you can’t own property that’s below the mean high tide line. What happens when it moves?
https://www.flseagrant.org/wateraccess/common-law-statutes/